Journey To The Centre Of The TARDIS – Episode discussion

It’s that time of the week again, folks. I was out last night, so only caught Journey To The Centre Of The TARDIS this afternoon.

In a nutshell: A space salvage crew snares the TARDIS, Clara gets lost somewhere inside, and The Doctor tricks the salvage guys into helping him find her. Oh, and there are weird scorched space-zombies lurking in the bowels of the time machine…

My take: It’s a massive improvement on the recent run of episodes. They could have invested a little more time exploring the TARDIS – I wasn’t a big fan of the endlessly running through the corridors. And once again criticism for Clara – when lost in the depths of a seemingly infinite time machine after a violent blast knocks you out, wouldn’t you be a little panicky about where your travelling companion was? Clara simply wandered off.

And even when she found out the truth of The Doctor’s name…no reaction. And even when she found out what the monsters REALLY were – she didn’t seem all that devastated either.

Still, a nice nostalgic trip through the TARDIS. I’m just not entirely sure if that Big Friendly Button was an ironic touch (especially given the overuse of the Sonic Screwdriver lately) or if it was a genuinely lame way to reset everything at the end of the episode.

Let’s chat it out – what was your take on the latest Doctor Who episode?

4 Comments

I’m pretty sure every episode this series has been a story wrapped around a plot point. I expect the hads to feature at the end. I expect the remember stuff to be significant. Last night we had a machine that builds anything you need.

here goes..

what does the doctor need? Companions. Weve never seen on have children ( maybe, just maybe Amy /river, but river is a child of the tardis, and Amy reveals she is sterile..)

Maybe the tardis needs the doctor to follow a path, needs Clara, and keeps dropping her in his path?

what does the tardis need? A time lord. Maybe the tardis created the doctor. When he breaks, what happens? Regeneration. Which looks remarkably like being rebuilt.

maybe the tardis can/will have /created the entire universe?

The book must have been written by the doctor on account of being one of the few living creatures to escape it. Would he have written his name in there or written in the third person?

Presumably The aged-1103-Doctor is the one who comes back after the whole Big Bang incident. In which case when he talks about his age he’d say he’s over a thousand years old.

So why, in Journey (towards the start), does he tell Clara he’s over 900 years old? As if he’s the aged-909-Doctor who arrives after 1103 dies at Lake Silencio. Have we missed something here? Is this a writer’s error, or is something else going on?

Have we, in fact, somehow been watching the original explosion, especially when they walked through the explosion suspended in time?

Can anyone identify the shape of the crack in time in Journey? Is it the same as, or different from, the crack in Amelia’s wall?

first, it bothered me that rules were ignored/broken in this episode. Clara lost? No problem. Shut down all of the Tardis rooms and she’ll be ported straight to the control room –or so we were taught in The Doctor’s Wife. The time war book was in english? Oh it must have been translated by the Tardis… except, remember in A Good Man Goes to War when River explained, “that’s auld high gallifreyan; the Tardis doesn’t translate that.” Hmm guess it does now, eh?

Second, of course the doctor’s name provokes no reaction in Clara. Why would it? Unless it were “jesus christ” or “ghengis khan: it wouldnt. Its some gobbledygook Gallifreyan name like Hoopsipopple. At best she’d giggle.

Here’s a curious theory, tho.

What if Clara IS the Doctor. She keeps coming back to life because she just regenerates, even partially. The man we THINK is the Doctor isn’t. He’s a construct of the Tardis, there to rouse the Doctor from his self imposed memory loss. SO- the doctor WILL reveal his name… because that’s not his name. He isnt the Doctor. When Amy and Rory “died” he used the fob watch to become human, even regenerated into a human female, and took the name Clara -to escape from the grief.

Probably not the case but I bet it would be more interesting than what theyre about to give us…

That would be an interesting and potentially mindblowing development. I noticed that Clara didn’t especially react to reading the Time War book, which was strange.

I don’t believe Clara is a Time Lord at all though. Have heard one theory that she’s connected to the little girl from Silence In The Library, which would be interesting since that’s the episode where River Song dies. Or is uploaded to the mainframe. Could she be some kind of clone/beacon across space and time to call The Doctor back to rescue her? Who knows? Could be interesting though, because River is in the next episode.